Animated

March 16, 2014

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras D written by Jill E. Blotevogel, Tom Rogers, Jule Selbo directed by John Kafka

by Walter Chaw Split into three parts, aptly like the anthology horror films The Monsters Club and Trilogy of Terror, Disney's own direct-to-video horrorshow Cinderella II: Dreams Come True reeks of corners cut and the kind of flaccid inspiration fuelled by the urge towards filthy lucre. The animation is an embarrassment to the Disney imprint, a half-step above the cut-and-paste style of Cartoon Network's "Space Ghost", and the writing is so lifeless, so feckless, it does nothing to forgive the paucity of attractive, liquid images. The backgrounds are static at all times, the characters move in stiff fits and starts (jittering and freezing just prior to edits), and the colours are lustreless. I would forgive a ballroom dance sequence, recycled no fewer than ten times over the course of the film (and serving as the DVD release's menu motif), not to mention the multiple rancid "remixes" of "Bibbidy, Bobbidy, Boo," if there were one moment in the enterprise that didn't make me want to lie down in a dark room with something cool to my brow.

by Bill Chambers If Disney's animated features can be reduced to a stable of alternating boy movies and girl movies, then the studio's decision to make the cross-dressing fable Mulan at a juncture when they really needed mass approval (that is, after striking out post-Katzenberg with Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Hercules) comes across as conspicuously non-partisan--and the hero's androgyny isn't the only bet-hedging the filmmakers practice. A meticulous recreation of Imperialist China, for instance, is compromised by anachronisms cultural and temporal (the eponymous Mulan (voice of Ming-Na Wen), a pre-Tang Dynasty Chinese maiden, is introduced to us wearing a tank top and what resemble capri pants; later, she is served bacon and eggs for breakfast), while musical numbers, subversive humour, and Spielbergian spectacle perpetually collide like bumper cars. The end-product is neither fish nor fowl, though it certainly leans towards foul.

March 14, 2014

**½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A-screenplay by Dwayne McDuffie, based on the comic book series by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely directed by Sam Liu

by Jefferson Robbins It's an adaptation so infatuated with its admirable source material that it fails to leap the gap between the two media. Anyone who glanced at the first page of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's "All-Star Superman" when it was published in 2005 knew it was special--a book that intended to crystallize the Superman legend and then refract the character to his logical/mythological extremes. That's been one of Morrison's most alluring talents as a comics scriptor. This is the guy, after all, who had "New X-Men"'s Beast evolving into a giant blue cat-man and shitting in a litterbox. So his Superman is a guy who can read your genetic code with a glance and temper a chunk of dwarf star into a housekey; someone whose goodness is so acute he can shame superhuman tyrants into working for the commonweal, all while he's knocking on death's door. In fact, in this twelve-issue interpretation, Superman is not only the saviour of his world, but also the creator of our own. It demands repeat visits--unlike its Blu-ray spin-off. The DC Universe direct-to-video films, from the shop of producer Bruce Timm, almost all share one common element: seen once, they never need to be seen again.

Editor's Note: This review pertains to the original Japanese-language version of The Wind Rises.

by Walter Chaw Hayao Miyazaki's alleged swan song The Wind Rises is mature, romantic, grand storytelling that just happens to be something like a romanticized biography of Jiro Horikoshi, the aeronautical engineer behind the design of the Mitsubishi A5M, which led, ultimately, to the Zero. Indeed, for a Western audience, watching Jiro's dreams of squadrons of Zeros buzzing over fields of green is chilling, and advance critics seemed unable to distinguish the Japanese war machine from the film's focus on a life lived in pursuit of dreams. In truth, separating these two aspects of the picture--the proximate and the historical--is self-defeating. (Dismissing the movie out of hand is equally blinkered.) One without the other, The Wind Rises loses anything like substance, resonance, importance. It would fall on the one side into gauzy bullshit, on the other into Triumph of the Will. As is, it's something more akin to Studio Ghibli's own Grave of the Fireflies in its humanizing of a man whose dreams were corrupted into something terrible. Einstein would be one of the West's potential Horikoshi corollaries--and if Miyazaki had done Albert's biography, I'd expect to see mushroom clouds illustrating his fantasies of relativity. For Horikoshi, Miyazaki provides upheavals and disasters as highlight to each of his life events: He first meets his wife in a train crash; in a lilting epilogue, when Jiro bids farewell to his dead wife, Miyazaki offers fields of devastation and a village in flames. Throughout, Miyazaki presents earthquakes, rainstorms, sudden bursts of wind as reminders of...what? The inevitability of change? The portents of war? The cycles of life and death? All of that; but what compels is the idea of helplessness in the face of larger forces--that although we chase our dreams, we're never really in control of our destinies.

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The Jungle Book receives only two passing mentions in Neal Gabler's mammoth biography of Walt Disney, even though it has the distinction of being the last animated film Disney lived to produce and ended his career in a commercial triumph to bookend the early success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Gabler's brevity on the subject suggests that The Jungle Book was of little consequence to Disney, but there are clues to the contrary between the lines, such as when Gabler writes tantalizingly about Walt's opinion that early drafts of the script were too "sober." Indeed, he was personally invested in the project to the point of choosing it over his relationship with long-time story man Bill Peet, who'd brought Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli stories to Disney's attention in the first place. Peet's adaptation was, as Walt saw it, beset by its fidelity to Kipling, and he solidified his vision for lighter-hearted fare by hiring radio icon Phil Harris, whose husky, hearty voice would become synonymous with Disney animation in those posthumous years. The energy and levity Harris brought to the minor character of Baloo the Bear led to a reconceiving of the narrative so that it pivoted, in Gabler's words, on the Falstaff/Prince Hal dynamic between Baloo and child hero Mowgli.

by Bill Chambers On a school trip to Monsters, Incorporated, young cyclops Mike Wazowski, the kind of pipsqueak who gets saddled with the teacher when his classmates choose partners, sneaks onto the scaring platform and follows an octopus-like creature through one of the closet-door terminals. Rather than reprimand him, the monster tells Mike he might have what it takes to become a scarer and gives him his cap, Mean Joe Green-style. That hat bears the logo of the Scarer's alma mater, Monsters University (better than Fear Tech!); an undergrad is born.

by Walter Chaw If
not for a moment where John Cusack delivers in his Cusack Patter™ a
speech about the beauty of love in a temporary world, there would be
nothing at all to recommend Martian Child. It's a
heartless bit of heartfelt pap wherein widower and sci-fi author David
(Cusack™) decides on an apparent whim to adopt crazy-ass little boy
Dennis (Bobby Coleman) from a day-care/orphanage that should have its
license revoked. The little kid looks and acts like Michael Jackson,
complete with DayGlo complexion, parasol, and breathy squeak-talk from
the Jennifer Lopez school of urgency, turning Coleman's into the most
irritating performance since the last time Lopez was in anything.
Closer to the point, the screenplay is a series of non-reactive
statements expected to be taken at face value: that this dude would
adopt a quirkily-disabled kleptomaniac freakshow and feel the sting of
parental devotion, for instance, or that the two of them would teach
each other to, gulp, love again. It all plays like an Oliver Sacks case
study by the end, a Paul Simon adult-contemporary story-song--The Boy
on the Specimen Tray and the Dog Reaction Shot.

PERSEPOLIS***½/****screenplay by Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi, based on the novel by Satrapi
directed by Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET

by Walter
ChawSweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
is easily Tim
Burton's best film. It's uncompromised, deceptively uncomplicated,
perverse in the most delightful way, and, maybe most importantly, it
represents at last the full potency of Burton's German Expressionist
vision. No surprise that it's closest allayed to Burton's previous
career-pinnacle, his self-contained fairytale Edward
Scissorhands--sporting,
like that film, a black-clad protagonist festooned with blades who
achieves his adolescence (and purpose) in a slanted attic chamber. This
is another gothic romance, no explanation for snow but instead
demonstration of the frugal repast of revenge's dish served cold. It's
best described as a diary of the unrequited, a journal of terminal,
irresolvable frustration. A violent, giallo-lurid
succession of
leering throat-slashings with a soupçon of cannibalism (I'm kind of
shocked, truth be told, that the picture was completed in this form),
this adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's genius 1979 musical is a timely
film, boasting the sort of contemporary topicality of which only
eternal works like Sondheim's are capable. Whatever the circumstances
of its creation, watching it in this way speaks explicitly to the
dismal tide of 2007, the desire to recover the illusory past (its hero
speaks of his younger self as "naïve")--the recognition at the last
that things are only ever as terrible as they've ever been; and that
the only refuge from despair is embracing the tiny moments of human
connection that make life liveable.

by Bill Chambers The day The Lion King came out, during the summer of Gump, I bought a ticket for Wyatt Earp instead, convinced that I would be more satisfied by its three hours than by The Lion King's hour and change. Nobody remembers this now, but back then, the trades were counting on the reunion of Silverado collaborators Lawrence Kasdan and Kevin Costner to deliver the
sleeper hit of the summer; although back then everybody involved in the
production tried to pawn off the film's failure on the growing cult of Tombstone, the fact is that Wyatt Earp
is, if not the most boring movie ever made, perhaps the second-most.
Still, even when a friend rolled up his sleeve for me a few weeks later
to reveal four fingertip-sized bruises he sustained from watching The Lion King
with his girlfriend (she white-knuckled her way through the wildebeest
stampede 'til his arm went to sleep), I remained unconvinced that
Disney's latest blockbuster cartoon, which had grossed over $200M by
that point, was worth the price of a ticket, having been taken for a
ride by the prestige surrounding the dreadful Beauty and the Beast.

August 28, 2013

Please excuse this self-indulgent post, but the latest episode of my side-project "The Monster Show", "Shrink-Ray," just went live, in glorious 1080p. Thanks for checking it out, I hope it's a pleasant waste of your time. If you like what you see, you can catch up with previous instalments here.

July 24, 2013

by Walter Chaw What
begins as a miracle of cinema ends as an obscure endurance test, but
the visual landmarks that you pass along this strange animated
journey's way make the trip one of value. Akira is
two hours and five minutes of philosophical soup, a surrealistic
melding of Blade Runner, X-Men,
Firestarter, and Frank Miller's "Sin City" mixed by the
melancholic sensibilities of the only culture that has experienced the
Atomic bomb, with a healthy sampling of really fast motorcycles tossed
in for visceral crunch.

July 20, 2013

by Walter Chaw There's a lightness to the heroes of Monster House,
as well as a certain callous insouciance in the way the film handles
itself as a metaphor for puberty, but the effects for the titular
monster and the care with which it sketches the human monster living
inside it make the picture fascinating. When it's humming, above and
below, the contraption identifies the malady of adolescence as
loneliness, as becoming an outcast caste of one ("This is why we
sit by ourselves at lunch"), if in mind only. It knows the sudden,
emboldening rush of recognizing a girl's charms, and it sees in
friendship the bonds and courage that time hasn't yet had the chance to
disdain. None of this is surprising, particularly, especially since its
executive producers are Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg--who,
between them, have fashioned some of our finest monuments to the cult
of childhood. But then Monster House throws a curveball and makes its bad guys...tragic. And not just tragic but unbearably
tragic--tragic enough that they become ennobled through their tragedy;
by the end of the film, with its surprising declaration of "freedom,"
what could have been a trite affirmation of the ironic swap of the
fears of childhood for the anxieties of the teenage years is
transformed into a more ecumenical discussion about how life is
sacrifice and love is sometimes unrequited, and about loyalty to causes
in which we believe and the people in whom we invest ourselves.

July 8, 2013

by
Ian Pugh It only takes a cursory glance at its cast of characters and
the people embodying them to see the kind of trendy thinking that sank Despicable
Me. The movie presents us with the headmistress of an
orphanage clearly modeled after Edie McClurg--but rather than hire
McClurg herself to voice the role, they got the Kristen Wiig, who hits
her one, monotonous note over and over again. The antagonist proper is
a bespectacled, bowl-cut pervert in an orange jumpsuit--but rather than
have Eddie Deezen play him in full-blown Mandark mode, they got Jason
Segel to shout a couple of dick jokes to the rafters. Finally, in the
centre ring is Steve Carell, performing with a bizarre accent lodged
somewhere between Boris Badenov and Ivan Drago. While Carell does an
admirable job for what he's given, he's a little too dry to be a
successful voice actor--you can't help but think that someone like
Billy West or Tom Kenny would have done something truly great with the
role.

July 6, 2013

by Walter Chaw Yôko
Kanno's soundtrack for Cowboy Bebop: The Movie
(hereafter Cowboy Bebop) is a jubilant a blend of
funk, jazz, blues, soul, and punk that soars even though it's a pale
shadow of the "bebop" innovated by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie,
Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell (and Kenny Clarke and Max Roach) in
Minton's Playhouse in the early 1940s. It functions as something of a
brilliantly mellifluous backbone to the film and the series that
spawned it--chimeric and socially significant, again like Bird's bebop,
in that the 26-episode Japanese television series became one of the
most recognized and revered crossovers in animated series history. The
bebop idea of riffing on a melody to the extent that the melody becomes
unrecognizable (with an attendant introduction of dozens of beats to
the standard four-beat bar) carries through in the frenetic kineticism
of series that also, by its format, mirrors jazz bebop's compact
agility (generally carried by quartet and quintet arrangements)--making
a feature-length film, then, a strange place for the "Cowboy Bebop"
franchise to go.